Abstract
By maintaining the spiritual centrality of Israel as God’s “holy remnant,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, unwittingly perhaps, entered into negotiations with Jewish thinkers over their continued theological and cultural relevance to German society. This paper focuses on the Jewish side of these negotiations by examining the work of three Jewish thinkers who helped shape them, Franz Rosenzweig, Hans Joachim Schoeps and Martin Buber. Despite their divergence from one another, the theological approaches of Rosenzweig, Schoeps and Buber represent a common attempt to map out the course of twentieth-century Jewish identity construction based on a shared, but at times unacknowledged engagement with Christian thought and culture. Their writings constitute a mutual opposition to the perceived failure of their forbearers in the Wissenschaft des Judentums to balance Jewish particularity and universalism, while at the same time reflecting a desire for varying degrees of mutual coexistence with their Christian contemporaries. Ultimately the work of Rosenzweig, Schoeps and Buber confirmed Bonhoeffer’s portrayal of the continuing validity of Jewish existence in relation to God during the Holocaust, while at the same time providing models for a later, dialogical mapping of Jewish identities vis à vis Christianity in an increasingly multicultural, post-Holocaust world.
Highlights
God abundantly shows his faithfulness by still keeping faith with Israel after the flesh, from whom was born Christ after the flesh, despite all their unfaithfulness, even after the crucifixion
By portraying Jewish theology in universal terms as the seed of ethical monotheism in western history, the scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums diluted Jewish particularity as a contemporary religious community and essentially transformed it into an historical consciousness.[4]. Marginalized by their neo-Orthodox contemporaries, these reform-minded Jewish scholars were forced to compete with their liberal counterparts in the Protestant community for intellectual supremacy by resorting to apologetics and polemics to define themselves.[5]. In his 2004 book Challenging Colonial Discourse: Jewish Studies and Protestant Theology in Wilhelmine Germany, Christian Wiese presents substantial evidence to suggest that the members of the Wissenschaft des Judentums “with a few exceptions, did not find a partner who was willing to recognize Judaism as a relevant and legitimate cultural factor in German society and to respond to it, let alone to take it seriously as a dialogue partner,”[6] confirming Gershom Scholem’s classic negative characterization of a perceived German-Jewish symbiosis as a “cry into a void” in his 1962 essay, “Against the Myth of a German-Jewish Dialogue.”[7]. Wiese concludes that German Protestant antiJudaism had a “fatal connection with growing antisemitism” characteristic of the Nazi racist hatred of Jews in the Holocaust.[8]
In his review of the German edition of Wiese’s book, Wissenschaft des Judentums und protestantische Theologie im wilhelminischen Deutschland— Ein Schrei ins Leere, Henry Wasserman argues that Wiese’s evidence does not necessarily support Scholem’s thesis and should not be attributed with such significance
Summary
God abundantly shows his faithfulness by still keeping faith with Israel after the flesh, from whom was born Christ after the flesh, despite all their unfaithfulness, even after the crucifixion. Protestant community for intellectual supremacy by resorting to apologetics and polemics to define themselves.[5] In his 2004 book Challenging Colonial Discourse: Jewish Studies and Protestant Theology in Wilhelmine Germany, Christian Wiese presents substantial evidence to suggest that the members of the Wissenschaft des Judentums “with a few exceptions, did not find a partner who was willing to recognize Judaism as a relevant and legitimate cultural factor in German society and to respond to it, let alone to take it seriously as a dialogue partner,”[6] confirming Gershom Scholem’s classic negative characterization of a perceived German-Jewish symbiosis as a “cry into a void” in his 1962 essay, “Against the Myth of a German-Jewish Dialogue.”[7] Wiese concludes that German Protestant antiJudaism had a “fatal connection with growing antisemitism” characteristic of the Nazi racist hatred of Jews in the Holocaust.[8] in his review of the German edition of Wiese’s book, Wissenschaft des Judentums und protestantische Theologie im wilhelminischen Deutschland— Ein Schrei ins Leere, Henry Wasserman argues that Wiese’s evidence does not necessarily support Scholem’s thesis and should not be attributed with such significance. They all embarked on an existential path toward Jewish self-identification, yet their shared route would give way to divergent pathways reflecting their ambiguous political and theological status vis à vis German Christian culture
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